The highest court of the United Nations ruled on Tuesday that neither Croatia nor Serbia committed genocide against each other’s peoples when they waged war during the breakup of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s.

A Medellin court ordered the investigation of former Colombian President Alvaro Uribe for his alleged involvement in a 1998 massacre that has been haunting the former head of state in spite the fact that a number of key witnesses have been murdered or extradited.

In 1995 the Bosnian Serb army killed more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslims in what was known as the Srebrenica massacre. And after nearly 20 years and a ten-year legal battle, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia(ICTY) has upheld its guilty verdicts against five of the men involved, confirming sentences of between 18 years and life for what has been judged to be a crime against humanity involving genocide.

South Africa has granted parole to Eugene de Kock, the convicted death-squad leader widely known as “Prime Evil” because of his torture of black activists during the apartheid era, after he served two decades in prison, the Justice Ministry said on Friday.

No member of the British security forces has been tried and convicted since the Good Friday agreement of 1998 in connection with state killings during the Troubles, a human rights organisation has found.

There will be no role for Colombia’s leftist FARC guerrilla movement in the nation’s armed forces even if peace talks now underway produce an end to the country’s long civil war, Colombian Defense Minister Juan Carlos Pinzon said Friday.

Sri Lanka is planning an investigation into accusations of human rights abuses in the final stages of a 26-year civil war amid international frustration at the failure to look into numerous civilian deaths, a government spokesman said.